TIFF ‘09: What to expect from LiC
The 34th Toronto International Film Festival gets underway today with the world premiere of Creation, the Charles Darwin bio starring real life spouses Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly as Mr. and Mrs. Darwin. It wraps up September 19th with the North American premiere of Young Victoria starring Emily Blunt.
With over 270 features (more than 90 of them world premieres by my count) from dozens of countries around the world, it’s going to be impossible to keep track of everything – even from a safe distance. The question I’ve been mulling over lately is “what will be the shape of LiC’s long distance coverage this year?” Thanks to periodic blog burnout, I’ve slighted Toronto in the past, but this year I scheduled my post-summer downtime for the couple of weeks leading up to the festival and I think I’m ready.
Even so, I can tell you right now this isn’t the place to turn for comprehensive festival coverage. I realized as I was parsing reviews for some of the higher profile movies playing at Venice and Telluride that I didn’t much care about the buzz surrounding movies I was already planning on seeing. Todd McCarthy’s opinion of The Road or The Informant! is largely meaningless to me and his opinion of Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man will be even more insignificant.
So, although it’s the movie of 2009 I’m anticipating more than any other, I won’t be reading or writing a word about the reaction to A Serious Man at Toronto. I don’t care what anyone thinks, least of all overstressed and overloaded festival critics. Same thing goes for most of the other high profile films making their world premieres over the next 10 days. If you just have to know what critics thought of Drew Barrymore’s Whip It or Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying, look elsewhere. In fact, your best bet is to turn to David Hudson over at The Auteurs Notebook. The guy is relentless, thorough and quick in aggregating festival reviews. If you’re not at a festival yourself but want to know what’s going on, he’s the guy to turn to.
As for LiC, the basic plan is to ignore the stuff we all already want to see and focus on bringing some surprises to your attention. To that end, I’ve got a list of around 30 lower profile world premieres that I’ll be watching reviews of and hopefully some unexpected gems will crop up along the way. We’ll see how it goes.
Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: TIFF 2009, Toronto International Film Festival
Basically I do agree with what you say here about critic overload at the Toronto Film Festival, and I will also ignore what they say about the Coens film and THE ROAD. Sometimes it works in reverse, as in the case of THE LIBERTINE, with Johnny Depp, which seemingly was a major hit at that festival only to flounder critically when it opened wide. In that instance I agreed with the Toronto crowd, as THE LIBERTINE is way better than what US critics felt.
In the case of A Serious Man (screening today), partly I just want to remain in the dark about it. I’ve seen the poster and the trailer. That’s enough. Now I just need to see the movie. A bunch of people whose tastes I don’t share (especially when it comes to The Coens) nattering about the movie isn’t something I need right now.
Most of us have pretty much made up our minds whether or not we want to see it and what Todd McCarthy thinks about it really doesn’t matter, does it?